Britain's shadow minister for borders and immigration, Labour's Chris Bryant, promised to take on the big corporations this week. But as his embargoed speech was leaked to big business, the nation watched his political resolve melt into nothing.

Friends and corporate funders of the ruling Conservative-led
coalition have been sacking thousands of workers. They then
market those same jobs to cheaper foreign workers, bringing
misery to Labour's traditional working-class supporters.

Frequently those jobs are not even advertised in the UK. Former
employees have to re-apply for their old jobs so long as they're
prepared to accept worse pay and conditions.

Standing nervously behind the workers directly hit by this
practice are millions of other apprehensive wage earners. They
can see how this further corrodes what has become an increasingly
brutal job market.

It is the dedication of staff, not just how much they're paid,
that determines how good a service the public receives. Staff who
know they can be sacked at the drop of a hat do what they are
told by their managers out of fear, rather than respect. Before
long that culture of fear impacts on everything a business
touches.

From the voice on the phone, through quality control, to the
customer facing staff, as the company's commitment to the
employee goes down, so the glue that holds the business together
starts to come unstuck.

The figures, of course, look good on paper. Boardroom
presentations with those efficiency graphs zigzagging gradually
up accompanied by photographs of smiling staff in neatly-pressed
uniforms.

But as well-paid lobbyists for these multinationals successfully
demand the erosion of employment rights, trust in these
cost-cutting companies is undermined. Trust doesn't figure on the
balance sheet, but it's the only truly important quality a
company has (or doesn't have).

This is one of the chief reasons why recruitment agency Office
Angels found last week that over half of Britons in work want out
of their present job, for the first time in decades. Off the
balance sheet again: an unhappy company is a bad company.

Practices like these are turning the UK into a “conscript
economy.” Thirty years of retreat from Labour's 1970s policy
of full employment has tipped the balance between employer and
employee off the scales, until the employer holds all the cards.

Yet, despite the slump, there seems no let-up in the flood of
economic migrants moving to Britain. Last week's net migration
figures show that in the year to June 2012, 165,000 people, or
nearly 500 a day, moved to the UK.

On New Year’s Day 2014, Bulgarians and Romanians too are about to
be allowed to work in the UK – boosting the net figure to over
200,000.

This influx is doubly bad, cutting both ways into UK disposable
incomes. It helps keep house prices artificially high, and wages
artificially low. So Labour has realized that not all critics of
immigration are racists and, we are told, is seeing the error of
its ways.

Party chiefs, for the first time, have been weighing the rights
of the British worker who loses their job against the right of
the migrant to work anywhere in the EU. Weighing up, too, the
good work an immigrant worker might do, against the cost to the
British taxpayer of yet another British family on the dole.

So, for Britain's opposition party, standing up for dwindling
employment rights should have been an open goal.

Yes, migrant labor is justified and welcome when a country has
full employment but with, for millions, wages not enough to live
on and real unemployment hovering around 10 percent, to low-paid
workers bringing in migrant labor just drives them further into
poverty.

So Labour’s Chris Bryant was going to weigh in this week to
explain that Her Majesty's Opposition now thought it was wrong. A
plea both to the origins of the Labour Party, standing up for the
victims of cruel and greedy bosses... and to pragmatism. That it
wasn't racist to discourage economic migration.

"Take the case of Tesco, who recently decided to move their
distribution centre...." he was due to say, "...staff at
the original site, most of them British, were told that they
could only move to the new centre if they took a cut in pay. The
result? A large percentage of the staff at the new centre are
from the Eastern bloc."

But Tesco's friends in the London media tipped them off with a
leaked copy of the speech, so after a call to Labour Party
headquarters from Tesco this became:

"Take Tesco. A good employer and an important source of jobs
in Britain... Yet when a distribution centre was moved to a new
location existing staff said they would have lost out by
transferring and the result was a higher proportion of staff from
A8 countries... Tesco are clear they have tried to recruit
locally."

Rarely do we get the opportunity to see so transparently how meek
our politicians have become in the face of corporate lobbying.
Tory Tesco effectively rewriting the speech of an opposition
politician, no doubt with strong-arming from Labour Party
apparatchiks, too.

Bryant's key allegation about the cut in pay disappeared.
Instead, Tesco is "a good employer" that has "tried to
recruit locally." Dead on the cutting-room floor, too, is
another fact that many low-paid UK jobs are not even advertised
in Britain any more.

To the tune most of us know as “Oh, Christmas Tree” or
“Tannenbaum,” Labour Party activists used to traditionally
sing “Let’s Keep the Red Flag Flying Here” on May Day,
which called for a worldwide, worker-managed utopia with no
borders. But when the Labour Party is no longer allowed to
criticize practices that take food out of children's mouths,
throw hard-working people out of a job, and possibly onto the
streets, that party may as well pack its bags.

If the present leadership is not purged, Labour may go the whole
hog and, as in Greece, show its true blue colors by going into a
formal coalition with the big corporations.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.